they didn't deceive you.

Nah. Through the 70s into the 80s Disney made a whole string of crappy, live-action movies that had Don Knotts and/or Sandy Duncan in 'em. This is but a taste.

This one actually is nowhere near as lame as most of the stuff coming out of Disney from this era. If you didn't grow up near this period, more than likely there's dozens of Disney films you haven't heard of since they sort of faded away and, to the best of my knowledge, a shit ton of them have never seen the light of day on DVD, except a few that got squeezed onto those Disney Archives boxes.
Cat From Outer Space is dumb in that late 70s kids movie kind of way, but it's inoffensively dumb. It's just G rated and that's about it.
But there were a lot of major bombs from this time period. Condorman, that one about the white African guy who runs marathons, remakes of even older Disney classics, Million Dollar Goose or whatever, Freaky Friday, etc...

Back in grade school I had a close friend who was pretty in to Freaky Friday, but I managed to never see it.

I made my father rent this film on VHS from the store so many times that he just gave up and bought it, back in the 80s when they were expensive to buy. I LOVED this film to DEATH.

And now I am pretty picky about movies nowadays; I would rather watch no movie at all than a bad movie.

Yeah for some reason I was obsessed with this movie when I was 6 or so, to the point that for my 7th birthday the party was all about THE CAT FROM OUTER SPACE, and my parents rented a VCR (remember when that was a thing?) and the movie so me and my friends could watch it yet again. And I was probably the only one who liked it.

At the time I had a cat who looked like the titular cat and maybe that's why I was so into it? I remember trying to make the magic collar so that my cat could also have the crazy awesome space powers. (This cat did not appreciate me trying to put a shittily-made collar on him.)

Actually that narrows it down to 6 years old exactly, because we got that cat when I was 5 and I remember being in 1st grade when the cat died in a rather unfortunate freak garage door accident. We had a wooden garage door and he liked to climb it like a tree, and one time he was climbing on it and then the door opened - and he got so freaked out that he couldn't let go. And got crushed in the door frame.

FORTUNATELY I didn't see it (it happened while I was at school), but my parents told me what happened and I was mad at them for not letting me see the dead cat (in retrospect they made the right choice) and then I obsessed about this cat and made crude sprite animations on the C64 to try to visualize what happened as part of my coping/grieving process.

Okay, now I remember why I was obsessed with this movie.

Hm, just watched a clip, and no, the cat in the movie didn't look anything like my cat. But who knows what it looked like on the watched-a-billion-times rental VHS tape that I saw it on.

And I do definitely remember trying to give that cat ultra space cat powers.

I'm sorry about your kitty, honey, that's awful. :(